We have talked a lot about not relying on open-rates as a final metric for judging the effectiveness of your email campaign. We have always stressed using rigorous and conclusive numbers, like revenue per email or conversions per email. However, at the end of the day, if your email isn’t opened, then your recipients aren’t converting, and your revenue per email is non existent. So email open rates are important to keep track of, right?
Right, but email open rates are more important for the trends they show than for the actual numbers themselves. As long as opens are going up relative to... Read More

It might seem a little repetitive, us preaching about email automation over and over again, but it’s because we honestly believe in the power of automation to help meet business goals. Which business goals? Well, any and all of them. Don’t believe us, a recent case study from MarketingSherpa discussed how B2B marketers used email automation to bolster their existing customer service program. This campaign helped increase customer retention, and the team thinks they will see the goodwill generated through this marketing automation cascade into more repeat customers and a... Read More

As of last month, there is official confirmation (in this blog post from MediaPost) that email marketing has ended one era and begun a new one: one where engagement metrics from subscribers might soon become the dominant determinant of whether an email message hits your targets eyeballs or disappears into the spam folder without once touching the inbox.
This is not a sudden change, and has been in the works (and monitored by MarketTraq analysts) for some time. For instance, it’s been over a year since Google began rolling out their “priority inbox” technology, and Microsoft’s Hotmail... Read More

Shakespeare said “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But would an email about that rose, by any other name, get as many opens or clicks?
Having solved most of the technical issues with email, from deliverability to getting videos to play in the inbox, email marketers are starting to slowly turn their attention to the linguistics of a great email campaign.
Once the provenance of academics and zealous editors and copywriters, statisticians and analysts are jumping on board to find an effective and meaningful application of linguistics and word choice on the behavior of... Read More

We talk a lot about testing, and for good reason. As data-driven email marketers, we know that testing is one of the most critical aspects of running high performing email campaigns.
As important as testing is to the success of your email marketing, most of the public advice available is either vague (“You should test”) or too specific for most marketers in a given niche, with little in the way of actionable takeaways (“we tested this one very specific thing, and here’s what happened”).
Here on MarketTraq Software’s OnTraq blog, we try and provide a logical middle ground – a... Read More

It seems that “local” has managed to become more than just a buzzword and is here to stay. CompTIA, an organization responsible for many of the certifications carried by IT staff, conducted research on technology and retailing earlier this year. The result? Retailers can’t get enough localization. The results, discussed in this Internet Retailer article, show that local marketing is here to stay: 21% of retailers surveyed said that they were already using geo-location service, while an additional 28% indicated that they are planning to start using one soon.
More interestingly, for us at... Read More

Pundits have been heralding the “death of email” for over a decade now. Ever since Facebook opened up to the public, certainly. Not surprisingly, it hasn’t happened, and in fact, email has seen increases in use by marketers in the recent past. Not only does email marketing still represent the best ROI of any marketing medium (with returns like $40 for each $1 spent), but it continues to lead the way for e-commerce stores both for driving direct sales and branding.
Case in point, InternetRetailer.com recently ran a case study about clothing retailer, April Cornell, driving sales with... Read More

Over ten years ago now, we had an idea: with all of the data clients were collecting about customers and their behavior, maybe they could use some of it to personalize their email. Today, various forms of behavioral based personalization and targeting have become more widespread –all based on a common principle: your customers know what they want from your brand much better than you do.
It’s great to see that after all these years, marketers are moving away from stale, more academic models of how ideal consumers are “supposed” to react and replacing them with constantly changing... Read More